Review: In ‘The Accidental Life,’ Golfing on LSD Is Just Part of an Editor’s Job

There’s a book I’ve been meaning to buy, a memoir called “Reflections of an Angry Middle-Aged Editor” (1960), by James A. Wechsler of The New York Post, because I like its title. I want a copy, too, because I know so many middle-aged editors who are angry and, after a drink or two, given to reflection.

Terry McDonell’s new memoir, “The Accidental Life: An Editor’s Notes on Writing and Writers,” isn’t bitter at all. But he prints a joke that gets at journalism’s collective longing for the way things were in the days before Yelp, Monster, Facebook, Match.com, CareerBuilder, Cars.com, Groupon, Craigslist and BuzzFeed came to drink its milkshake.

“Q: How many staffers does it take to change a light bulb at Time Inc.?

“A: Twenty-five. One to screw in the new bulb, and 24 to stand around talking about how great the old bulb used to be.”

Mr. McDonell was a founding editor of Outside magazine in 1977 and since then has had tenures at or near the top of Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Esquire and Sports Illustrated. It would be wrong to say he’s not rueful about the withering of legacy publications.

At Sports Illustrated, where he became the eighth managing editor in 2002, he “eliminated too many jobs to count,” he writes. Slashing costs and watching serious writers take buyouts felt “like a great library was burning down.”

But “The Accidental Life” is by and large a fond book. It’s a fan’s notes from a man who, before the apocalypse, edited and often befriended many of his literary heroes, including Edward Abbey, Thomas McGuane, Hunter S. Thompson, Peter Matthiessen, Kurt Vonnegut, James Salter, Jim Harrison, George Plimpton and Richard Ford.

“I wanted to ride along,” Mr. McDonell writes, and ride he does, like Mike Doonesbury in the sidecar attached to Mark Slackmeyer’s motorcycle in a memorable early “Doonesbury” strip.

Mr. McDonell, now 71, played touch football and ate oysters with Salter; he golfed while on LSD with Thompson and Plimpton; he canoed and drank with Matthiessen; and helped explode an uptight dinner party alongside Abbey. There are many similar anecdotes here, most of them mild.

Don’t come to “The Accidental Life” looking for score-settling or acid gossip. Mr. McDonell is writing about his friends. He isn’t opening his vault or baring his soul.

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Terry McDonellCreditRachel Cobb

These tendencies speak well of Mr. McDonell as a human being, but they have their drawbacks for the reader. This memoir is also light on female personages. Mr. McDonell edited a lot of men’s magazines. His memoir can seem to be covered with a pelt of tawny chest hair.

His insistence on keeping the focus on his writers rather than himself has a humble appeal. But here, too, something small but real is missing. We get tantalizing glimpses of his life. He grew up in Northern California, where his mother moved after his father died in World War II. As an adolescent, he ran wild in what sounds like James Dean fashion.

In college at Berkeley, younger students paid him to take their SATs for them. He was an activist in Students for a Democratic Society. His college roommate one year was Steve Lambrecht, who became, Mr. McDonell writes, “Zonker of Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the suave stoner portrayed in Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’ as getting ‘higher than any man alive.’”

Square of jaw and abundant of hair, Mr. McDonell published a novel titled “California Bloodstock” in 1980 that got him featured, alongside Richard Price, Barry Hannah and others, in a Playgirl magazine spread called “Write On Guys.” He’s been married more than once and has two children.

I’ve barely condensed the personal details above. That’s about all he says on these topics. I’d have read a great deal more about all of it.

In Manhattan, Mr. McDonell stood out. Art Cooper, a longtime editor of GQ, once called him “Montana-cowboy-hippie-poet weird.” He wore cowboy boots in the office. He fit right in at Mr. McGuane’s parties in Montana, where, he writes, “Men in boots and hats were smoking in the moonlight with sophisticated women.”

He evokes the magazine-world heyday of lavish offices, drinks carts in the evening and expense-account hedonism. Cocaine was cut with an art director’s X-ACTO blade. A short stack of photographic slides, rarely seen any longer, “felt good in your hand, like poker chips.”

Some of the details he provides will make freelance writers scream. (I screamed, and I rarely write freelance any longer.) Big publishing companies, he admits, “string out freelance payment as a matter of policy. This is ‘the float’ bankers talk about.” Your check, in other words, is still not in the mail.

Mr. McDonell is proud of each of his teams at the magazines he’s edited, but this memoir is far from self-congratulatory. He writes winningly about his regrets. When Spike Lee’s movie “Malcolm X” came out in 1992, Mr. McDonell put a photo of Mr. Lee on Esquire’s cover with his arms crossed. He signed off on the headline: “Spike Lee Hates Your Cracker Ass.”

He knew it was a disaster the moment he saw it in print. Mr. Lee called it a cheap shot. “That headline was hate-mongering and I’m still ashamed of it,” Mr. McDonell writes. “But it wouldn’t have been, and it would have been so easy to make it a much better headline by changing just one word: ‘Spike Lee Loves Your Cracker Ass.’”

As an editor, Mr. McDonell’s philosophy was “Avoid sameness, shun formula, let it rip.” I can’t say he’s entirely done these things in his memoir. But “The Accidental Life” is intelligent, entertaining and chivalrous. It’s a savvy fax from a dean of the old school.